Hi, I'm looking to build a system that will be upgradeable to two HDTV tuners eventually. I want to build my system now so that I can add two HDTV tuners later without significant problems. What kind of processor (AMD, INTEL, DUAL CORE, 64 or 32 bit, Etc) and what speed should I be looking at buying to accomplish this? Thanks for your help!!!

Additionally does anyone know if there are any HDTV tuners available that allow you to capture component input or if there is support for HDTV cable cards that can allow you to eliminate the set top box from the cable company.

You don't need much horsepower to record multiple HD shows. A stronger system helps in playing back those recordings. I use a Sempron 2800+, 1gb RAM, 250gb disk, Nvidia 6200 based graphics card with 256mb RAM. That's about the minimum for what you want to do. BTW I have three HD tuners.

All my recording is OTA, so I'll defer to someone else's expertise on capturing digital cable.

Thanks for the info.

If you don't mind me asking what model / brand of HDTV tuners do you have working successfully?

Not possible/practical. The ability to record full-stream, uncompressed HD is found only in studio equipment. No affordable PC has the processor or storage for this.
It's Wayyyyy different than recording a compressed HD stream.




Any QAM-capable card can do this. I think the PC-HD3500 and Air2PC 5000 cards do this. Note that you'll only the the "in the clear" unencrypted QAM channels. Probably the HD versions of your local stations. Forget about HBO. Forget about any "HD Tier" programming. ex: if your cable gives you ESPNHD for free, you may be ok. If they charge for it, you're out of luck.
Suggestion: find a forum that discusses HD in your local market, and see the "QAM List". That'll show you what to expect, and what channels to scan for. If there isn't a forum locally, there's probably a thread on AVSForum.

Windows users will be able to use "cable-card" to get encrypted channels. In this case, you rent a cablecard from the cable company, and pop it into your Windows Media Center box, and that unlocks the encrypted channels. But it's only available on Vista, and it's only available on high-end media center machines with the cable-card gizmo built-in. They even lock these things down so that the cable-card gizmo will only work with the PC that it was sold with. There's some hardware handshake with the BIOS. Right now, cable-card capability is out of reach of the Do-It-Yourselfer, and as far as I know, not available at all on Linux.

Anyway, for reference:
My system is a homebrew "Dragon 1.0" spec machine (AMD 64 3200), with 3 tuners (PCHD3000, Air2PC 5000, and KWorld 110). I can record on all 3 at once, and playback at the same time, with no problem. I'm running R5E50 with latest nVidia drivers + MrFarenheight's fixes.

I use air2pc tuners, I bought them on eBay.

I have three tuners, one HD-2000 and two HD-3000 tuners. I use an Intel 3.0GHz P4 with hyperthreading. Recording three shows is no problem and playback is no problem. I can comm-flag two shows while recording simultaneously and the comm-flag is finished a little after the show is done recording. I do not use XvMC but decode the video in software on my nVidia 6200-based card.

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